Visiting the Parisian History Museum at Hôtel Carnavalet in the Marais
District with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Laurent
and I set out to visit the Hôtel Carnavalet in the Marais District to learn
about the history of Paris in this museum.
The
Hôtel Carnavalet was built in 1548. In
1660, the architect François Mansart gave the building its Renaissance aspect
with ornamental gardens and rectangular courtyards.
The
sculptor Jean Goujon worked on the graceful Four Seasons bas-relief sculptures
that emerged from the walls around the courtyard.
Literature
lovers would adore the Hôtel Carnavalet no matter who worked on it, because
this was the home of Marie de Rabutin, Marquise de Sévigné. She lived in the Hôtel Carnavalet from 1677
to 1696 and wrote many letters to her daughter here.
The
Carnavalet Museum itself houses a collection of items devoted to the history of
Paris. We took a guided tour and then
went back to visit the museum ourselves.
I
was interested to learn that most families could not trace their Parisian lineage
back more than three or four generations.
Paris
grew rapidly in the 19th century, drawing many people to the
Capital. Surrounding villages like
Montmartre were surrounded intact by Paris expansion. However, Parisian dwellers tend to retire
elsewhere or move if they can to a country home that was often a vacation home
when they had children.
Paris
is a city for the young on the move or for people with merchandise to move like
artwork.
One
person who managed to live through the Revolution with his head intact and then
serve under the Napoleonic Empire was Talleyrand, the diplomat. He showed up in all of the official paintings
for diametrically opposed governments.
“There’s
a survivor and thriver,” I thought. He
would have coined a phrase like “What’s the word today?” to get Champagne and
truffles at a very reasonable price to hold cocktail parties under all
governments.
At
these cocktail parties he would probably wheedle information out of tipsy
foreign businessmen and women while giving them the addresses on where to find
great, designer clothing at a low price in return for rights to build the Suez
Canal.
(For
more information on Talleyrand, read Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV by
Emmanual Le Roy Ladurie.)
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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